Unlike some ideologues, I support laws prohibiting child pornography — but there are aspects to the current federal law on that subject that are truly insane. I assume (and hope) that federal prosecutors are using the current law properly, but I cringe at how it could be misused.

I find the arguments endorsed by the Supreme Court in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002) to be absurd. One of Justice Kennedy’s claims in that opinion was that the only constitutional basis for banning child pornography was to protect children who might be used in producing such materials. Using adult actors who look like children, or making “virtual child pornography” which is entirely the result of computer animation processes, and selling it as child pornography, according to Justice Kennedy, is an exercise of free speech protected by the First Amendment.

I find this absurd because there is simply no evidence that the Framers intended freedom of the press and freedom of speech to extend to depictions of sexual activity, and considerable evidence to the contrary. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England(a very influential work in the development of American law) clearly supports freedom of the press, but also recognizes that this was not an unlimited freedom:

[W]here blasphemous, immoral, treasonable, schismatical, seditious, or scandalous libels are punished by the English law, some with a greater, others with a less degree of severity; the liberty of the press, properly understood, is by no means infringed or violated.

Blackstone goes on to point out that the traditional argument for an official censor was to prevent the abuse of the freedom of the press. Instead, Blackstone argued that punishing criminal abuses of this freedom was a more effective way to prevent prior restraint.

Justice Joseph Story’s very influential Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833) also recognized that freedom of the press was only a protection against prior restraint, not a protection from punishment for “licentiousness.” Quoting Blackstone, Story observed,

A man may be allowed to keep poisons in his closet; but not publicly to vend them as cordials.

When Abner Kneeland was prosecuted for blasphemy in 1834 Boston, even Kneeland’s defense attorney recognized that freedom of the press, under either the Massachusetts Constitution or the First Amendment, had some limits.

The case of the prisoner at the bar, does not fall within that class of libels, for that class embraces merely lewd and lascivious publications, like some notorious works, filled with grossly indecent pictures and descriptions, calculated, to sully and corrupt the purity of youth, and to subvert the foundations of virtue.

It is difficult to imagine that child pornography would have been recognized by any of these people as protected by freedom of the press.

Laws that prohibit child pornography, even very broadly defined, are clearly constitutional — even if Justice Kennedy was not prepared to admit that. What has me concerned is how astonishingly easy it is to be unintentionally and unknowingly in violation of the current federal law. A recent posting by Professor Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy discussed the question of whether the federal government has authority to require you to perform some action — such as buying health insurance. An example that he gave of a current law that requires you to do something was the federal child pornography statute, which requires you to take several actions if you receive unsolicited child porn.

After reading that law, I am quite disturbed by how easy it would be to be unintentionally or even unknowingly in violation. If someone sends you child porn unsolicited, you have an affirmative defense if you “possessed less than three matters containing any visual depiction” and you “promptly and in good faith… took reasonable steps to destroy each such visual depiction” and “reported the matter to a law enforcement agency.”

Here’s the problem: if someone emailed you a message that contained child pornography attachments, your email program might well identify the email as spam, and throw it into your Spam folder. If you do not look in your Spam folder regularly and open all picture attachments (which is somewhat risky, since some viruses hide in attachments), you could easily receive child pornography and not know it. If you do not know that you have received it, you cannot very well destroy “each such visual depiction” and report it to a law enforcement agency.

There are all sorts of technical problems with child pornography laws and unintentional violations. One is that you might well have images on your computer that you did not even know are there. For example, if you click on this page, you will download a picture onto your computer that to Democrats — and many Republicans — qualifies as obscene, vile, and repulsive: Sarah Palin. But you won’t see the picture unless you click on the tiny little dot at the end of the page. If you don’t click on it (or if I had not made it possible for you to click on it), Sarah Palin’s smiling face will still have been downloaded to your computer.

Imagine if that downloaded image was child porn. You would not know you downloaded it to your computer — and therefore, you would have broken the law by failing to report it. Imagine if there were more than three illegal images downloaded to your computer. Even if you knew about them, and reported them to the police, you would not even have the affirmative defense available to you.

I won’t even go into the problem of viruses that hijack your computer and turn it into a child porn redistribution site. This is all the more reason to keep your antivirus software up to date and operational.

From all that I have seen, federal prosecutors have enforced the child porn law against people who intentionally broke the law, such as prominent leftist San Francisco radio talk show host Bernie Ward, who pled guilty to not just receiving child porn, but to redistributing it, and Charles Rust-Tierney, “past president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia,” who used his credit card to download video of sexual torture of girls under 12.

Nonetheless, the current child porn law has enormous potential for an unscrupulous prosecutor to destroy people who have unintentionally and evenunknowingly received child porn. I think a revision of that statute might be a good idea.

Clayton E. Cramer teaches history at the College of Western Idaho. His most recent book is My Brother Ron: A Personal and Social History of the Deinstitutionalization of the Mentally Ill (2012). He is raising capital for a feature film about the Oberlin Rescue of 1858.

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1.
DavidN

I gotta say I’m with Justice Kennedy on this one. Crime (regardless of the victim) is only criminal if it actually occurs. If you outlaw the *depiction* of child pornography, say a novel that involves someone having sex with an underage child, then you must also outlaw novels that depict murder, theft, prostitution…the list goes on. If you outlaw the depiction of the crime, as opposed to the crime itself, you soon find yourself trying to outlaw almost everything…and that will never work, let alone the consequences in terms of free speech.

And I’ve never liked the old “I can’t define it but I know it when I see it” definition of pornography either. It’s way too subjective, especially for a law. This is how Mapplethorpe is considered art, while straight porn never is in contrast. Stick with making things that actually occur illegal. Anything else is essentially a slippery slope.

One of the concerns about only criminalizing the production of child porn is that some child molesters show child porn to children to persuade that it is okay to do what the molester wants. “See? Others do it. It’s okay.” I’ve read accounts by victims describing exactly such uses.

You are wrong anyway.
Even if pedophile show depiction of underage sex to children to convince them, this can not be used as a excuse to prohibit the depiction (as is not its only use). This because the same could be told about depiction of robbery, murder, etc.
It is up to the guardians of the child and the child itself to understand what is proper and what is not. If he/she doesn’t know what is proper, his/her guardians must oversee her and prevent her to do so.
Usually, statistics at hand, around the 90% of the children abused sexually are abused in their family or from relatives, not from complete strangers.
Being mad about a 10% and act to curtail it of 1% damaging the entire society in the process is only stupid.

Let me also point out that Justice Kennedy’s opinion was not taking a position on whether there should be laws prohibiting child porn, but asserting that such laws are unconstitutional, unless they only prohibit the making of it with a real child. The question of whether such laws are constitutional is separate from the question of whether they are good public policy.

The job of the Supreme Court is not to legislate. It is to decide whether a law is constitutional or not. There is a difference.

The problem is that some liberal prosecutor will try and use these laws to attack a conservative.

All too often we see the courts used as a means of attacking political opponents. Remember Tom DeLay? Prosecutors can bring any charges against anyone. You can’t define pornography, so you can define absolutely anything as pornography if you wish. All it would take is the accusation to destroy a person.

They could even mail child porn to their victim, or hack in and leave it buried to be found during forensic examination. They had no problem tapping Newt Gingrich’s phone to find a scandal, so are they above planting child porn?

The problem is not the laws designed to protect children, but the potential for abuse of those laws.

The definition of child porn under the federal law is actually clear enough that I am not worried about abuse of what qualifies as child porn. It is the intentionality and knowingness requirements that concern me–and yes, those can be abused.

What everyone seems to forget is what the first amendment actually says… “Congress shall pass no laws… etc.” Doesn’t restrict the states. Doesn’t restrict the counties. Doesn’t restrict cities from passing laws against any particular speech such as pornography. This amendment has been as widely abused as has the second.

Excellent point. The 1A is a limit on the power of CONGRESS only. The Constitution does NOT prohibit the several States from making such laws, or even from establishing a state religion. For example, there is no Constitutional problem with Maryland making Catholicism the State religion of Maryland (a prospect that was not out of the question in their day).

This kind of abuse of the text of the Constitution (the supreme law of the land) by both “conservatives” and liberals directly undermines the Rule of Law.

While I won’t dispute that point, your argument about the first amendment not applying to the states has not been relevant since the 14th amendment was passed. Since it incorporates the Bill of Rights against the states, technically any provision that applies to Congress now applies to your state legislature. What we need is a repeal of the 14th amendment.

Here’s an even worse scenario WRT the hidden image scenario: what happens if a web page loads a bunch of hidden iframes that contain this content? It would be possible for an attacker to inject JavaScript into a web page that generates a 1×1 pixel iframe on the page that loads an entire page of pornography, not a single picture. In one bad HTML tag, you could be looking at going well over the three picture limit.

Your deletion of the images probably does not make them irretrievable. Good law enforcement computer forensics guys should still be able to pull them up. There will also be a digital trail left behind the pics.

Problem is, law enforcement can’t keep up with the developments of digital lawbreakers who develop new spoofing and cloaking techniques every day.

The concern is right, but the banning of the depiction is simply wrong.
Would we ban the depiction of Ancient Greece on pots because they are illegal in the modern US? Why don’t we destroy them?
Or we could burn a few of the National Geographic numbers (how many of their photos are of underage girls?

The idea and the depiction is not the act and the thing.

And this don’t touch the fact that some states in the US have very restrictive/stupid laws, putting in jail and destroying the lives of people only because they were 19 and their girlfriend 17 (or the reverse).

Which gets into standard of proof issues. I don’t know what the case law is, but a prosecutor could credibly argue that you should know what’s on your computer. This could lead to unequal application of the law; a 60-year old pervert could more credibly claim to not understand how his computer works than a 15-year old kid.

I suspect this has already happened here in Portsmouth, NH. I’ve seen accounts in the newspaper where someone is arrested for possession of child pornography after a local computer store notifies the authorities that they have detected it on a computer brought in for repair.

You saying knowing well what if the person has mental problems or an addiction to drugs or alcohol and to witch to you have no recolation of even doing it because if you ever been around a person that has these addictions you do things while under the influnence that you normally wouldnt do or even recall until you are told about the things you did.
But the the feds dont care these addictions or conditions maybe if we tried to help heal this person addictions or deal with the mental problem and help them become productive members of soceity we need to evaluated to see if they are even a threat verses throwing everyone in jail.

Those are all problems, but there are other problems. I don’t have the link handy, but there was recent case where a 15 year old girl took a picture of herself naked with her cell phone, and sent the picture to her boyfriend. Somehow, it got sent to some other people. Now she’s looking at charges of child porn trafficking, and potentially a sex offender record. The boyfriend may be in legal trouble too. Where’s the victim?

Plus, there are countless “cute kids in the bathtub” photos from more innocent times that could get innocent people arrested if they were ever scanned and put on the web. Worse, kids themselves don’t understand the danger and technology makes taking pictures so easy. Innocent photos by kids could get people arrested (and I don’t consider the photo by the 15 year old “innocent”). My wife and I had a very hard time convincing our daughter not to post a picture of herself in a thong bathing suit on the web. Kids are thinking, “wow! I look really good!”, not “wow! this could bring the gestapo down on friends and family!”

The issue of teens taking photos brings up the importance of trying to teach modesty to girls especially. *Not* putting it all out for public display makes you more alluring, not less. There are some good books out there making the case in modern terms, for instance Wendy Shalit’s “Return to Modesty”:

Anyway, modesty or not, simply accusing a 15 year old to be a sexual offender because she take a picture of herself half or full naked send it around is wrong and evil!!! She could be stupid, for sure, but jail is not the right solution.

This also defeat your previous example that people show depiction to children to manipulate them in believing it is normal. Now they must know to not shoot themselves or their peers, but they can not know that is wrong if an adult show them the same.

Why is she wearing such a suit in the first place? If it’s not appropriate on the Web, why is it appropriate at all? How many guys at school have pictures of her in that suit, taken at the beach or at pool parties?

You raise a good point. These laws were written not for that situation, but it is very difficult to come up with a law that excludes this stupidity and yet still punishes the pedophile engaged in the exchange of similar pictures.

What makes this pernicious isn’t just sentencing that’s disproportionate for this youthful stupidity, but the fact that the “sex offender” scarlet letter can follow even a juvenile around well into adulthood. If a juvenile robs a bank with a gun, there’s likely a few months in juvenile hall, and it all gets sealed at the age of 18. If a juvenile does something stupid with a cell phone, he or she can be a registered sex offender well into adulthood. There’s something very, very wrong with this picture.

Hollyweird is full of indoctrinated liberals who throughout their lives are taught to hate America first by their parents, and then their profs at institutions of “higher learning”, and lastly the movie industry. It used to be 300,000 people in the industry but now Californians are leaving the state like rats on a sinking ship because of the total incompetence of the liberal leadership. Remember though, the Hollyweirders sure won’t be giving up (or paying taxes) on their off-shore trusts when this country is flowing down the toilet with two more years of “The Anointed One.” Maybe he could call the rock’n’rollers to help. Oh, sorry, I forgot, most of them are probably busy with those Aliester Crowley Satanic meetings and the sacrificial evening festivities. Then there are all the hundreds of sad stories. Doctors now say that the amount of bogus prescriptions among celebrities and their children are staggering. Unfortunately, unless something is done soon, it won’t be long until we add another name to the list that already includes Michael Jackson, Anna Nicole Smith, Brittany Murphy, Heath Ledger and now Corey Haim. And lastly, they love their “heroes” like Roman Polanski. Only the European atheist’s love him more. But give Roman time, there’s always a chance for another Satan worshiping film winner?
So where are the real heroes’s for Hollyweird? I have some simple advice. You want to meet a real hero so you can figure out what kind of movie to make? Go talk to the three Navy SEALs who faced assault charges for capturing one of the most wanted terrorists in Iraq. Remember, when it comes to Hollyweird: There is no space as vacant as that of an actor without a script in their hand

Well I would agree something needs to be done about child porn laws just because you view such material doe not mean you are sick twisted person this has been a hot topic we talk about how bad this is well some need to see what is happening to fully understand like rubberneckers with an accident got to see how bad it is . But yet we assume the worst of the viewer the Pentagon can pay for it download it and some where prosecuted but a majority was not. I dont think it should matter how many pic you have the ones that need to be sentenced is the one that are doing harm to these child you got to stop it where it starts but these creeps are smarter than the feds so they have to make the public think they are doing a good job at cracking down on cp by throwing viewers in jail .I believe each case be dealt with on a case by case not by a mandatory sentence that say if you look ,how many pics etc.Maybe it was just human curosity wondering how bad is this next thing you know omg way to many pics
Or maybe you was using a p2p site downloaded what you thought was one thing but it was not sparks a curosity on wtf how could someone does this
so you research on how easy it to get wondering why arent they stopping
these sicko harming these kids .Or on this p2p site you got a corupt file and it stored this crap on there or a viruse that takes over your web browser and it makes it look like you did go out to these site .
Do the feds look for these viruse or are they eager to prosecute and how do we know if they did or didnt after all they are feds they wouldnt lie .

And btw, I have to congratulate Clayton for touching an “untouchable” issue. Criticizing kiddy porn laws is like criticizing MADD. Some things are just so sacred that any criticism invites the proverbial ton of bricks. Clayton’s got more balls than I do writing a piece like this with his real name.

“Well I would agree something needs to be done about child porn laws just because you view such material doe not mean you are sick twisted person this has been a hot topic we talk about how bad this is well some need to see what is happening to fully understand like rubberneckers with an accident got to see how bad it is .”

You raise an interesting problem: researchers studying the problem are technically in violation. Of course, a person might be “researching” the problem as a cover. That is the claim for why Kinsey started studying human sexuality–to come up with a scholarly justification for his attempts to import child porn, which he wanted for a very unscholarly purpose.

I will agree with you some do have evil intentions but you nor I can say that everyone does that would be unfair . Im just so tired of people throwing everyone into one pot when you make a stupid mistake .

Clayton, if you enjoy surfing for warez or porn chances are you will get plenty of unintentional ‘extras’ if you have a naked computer without a firewall or anti-virus/anti-worm program, but, as often as I’ve surfeed for both adult porn and warez, I have never encountered one shred of child porn even trolling the internet back alleys for the hot stuff. You have to be searching for some pretty lurid search-terms to ‘accidentally’ happenstance upon child porn of ANY kind.

I’ve also had enough disposable ‘spam accounts’ to keep my main accounts spam-free and never once in the last 12 years online have I been spammed with child-porn.

It’s not hard to delete all history and if you do suspect an email has child-porn…don’t delete it but save it as an attachment and forward it to the proper authorities (so that they can trace it).

Don’t be so sure that when you delete all history that everything that found its way on to your hard disk is gone. In the worst case, your computer could be a zombie kiddie porn server, and you wouldn’t even know it. And not every anti-virus catches everything. Plus, if you have less than about 1 ghz, you really can’t run anti-virus. AV takes a huge bite out of your computer resources.

It’s like bedbugs. Many of the people who have a problem do precisely because they refuse to believe that they could have a problem. The only way to be sure that there’s nothing nasty on your disk is to reformat it. And even then, a good detective can find remains.

I’m encouraged to hear that you aren’t running into this trash. My guess is that most people who end up with child porn on their computer probably went searching for it. I do keep open the possibility that someone might end up with it by accident, or because someone intentionally sent such materials as a way to get someone in trouble.

To even suggest that we have a better situation with porn since there is less rape is to completely ignore the jump in domestic sex trafficking in America and is negligent in considering all of the effects of the porn appetite in this country. I would also point to the existence of sex addiction clinics as an indication that our porn appetite is not a good thing.

Your article seems to indicate that there is no harm in porn/child porn, and perhaps has improved the crime situation. Try to tell that to the girls / boys who’ve been abused and forced into the sex industry, whose johns are heavy porn users.

We may have a right to free speech, but when that right infringes on the rights of others and more correctly encourages the perpetration of evil on those who are more vulnerable, then it is no longer a God-given right. It encourages crime.

Layne, I think you’ve misread the column. I don’t see anything in it that suggests the author is condoning child porn, or would favor legalizing it. He’s simply pointing out (correctly or not, I don’t know) that the wording is so broad that it presents a danger to innocent persons.

That has to be a concern for all of us. We cannot allow the desire to combat evil (in this form or others) to blind us to the danger of badly worded laws.

Just for the record, I don’t think I can be accused of being soft on child porn. I favor capital punishment for child molesters, and that includes those who create or possess child porn.

“Whoever knowingly or willfully advocates, abets, advises, or teaches the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying the government of the United States or the government of any State, Territory, District or Possession thereof, or the government of any political subdivision therein, by force or violence, or by the assassination of any officer of any such government; or”

“Whoever, with intent to cause the overthrow or destruction of any such government, prints, publishes, edits, issues, circulates, sells, distributes, or publicly displays any written or printed matter advocating, advising, or teaching the duty, necessity, desirability, or propriety of overthrowing or destroying any government in the United States by force or violence, or attempts to do so; or”

“Whoever organizes or helps or attempts to organize any society, group, or assembly of persons who teach, advocate, or encourage the overthrow or destruction of any such government by force or violence; or becomes or is a member of, or affiliates with, any such society, group, or assembly of persons, knowing the purposes thereof—
Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both, and shall be ineligible for employment by the United States or any department or agency thereof, for the five years next following his conviction…”

On the books (U.S. Code TITLE 18 > PART I > CHAPTER 115 > § 2385) since 1940, and a lot of people have been sent to prison over the years for saying or writing things foirbidden by that provision of the Smith Act.

The 1A is a total joke. The government ignores it anytime the urge hits them (especially if someone threatens politicians…for which see above). The 1A should be done anyway with, and replaced with something that actually makes sense, and that the government will actually honor.

There never has been and never will be a government that doesn’t exercise some control over what people say or write, nor would it be desirable if there was one.

The Kennedy test would exempt all text-fiction porn, regardless of content.

Some of this material describes outrageously perverted or destructive activity in favorable ways – describing the pleasures of inflicting sexual violence on unwilling victims, or describing children or other victims as enthusiastic participants who greatly enjoy the activity.

Fiction which celebrates or justiifies, for instance, racist violence, is rightly seen as incitement to such violence.

Fiction which celebrates or justifies sexual crime should be treated the same.

A problem with the “Virtual Porn” definition: Japanese Anime cartoons and Manga comics. Even Adult characters can be cartoony enough that they could be portrayed by an aggressive prosecutor as underage. It presents an unanswerable question, “How do you judge the age of a character in a drawing?” (Breast size? Is that like tree rings?)

I have an absolute red-hot hatred for anyone who harms a child, and I think anyone who is sexually aroused by children is a danger to society, but we can’t let our hatred for these things send us down the road of prosecuting “Thoughtcrimes” or writing laws so broad that anyone who is innocent can have their lives be destroyed. We should never write laws that are so flexible, and then trust prosecutors not to abuse them. Justice should be embodied in the laws as written, not as interpreted by one man.

One of the concerns that provoked the Virtual Child Pornography Act was that emerging computer animation technology would make it impossible or at least very difficult to determine if materials were virtual or real. Consider what happens if you take video and process it to give an animated “feel”–something like Sin City (2005).

The other concern was that molesters use child porn to normalize sexual activity to children by saying, “See? Others do this. It’s okay.” I don’t think the hazards involving anime are quite the same, because children who might be persuaded “This is okay” by video will generally recognize that cartoons are not real life.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. There’s already a fellow facing considerable jail time (I believe he is already serving) for his Manga collection. He was one of those guys who basically buys everything he can get his hands on and one of his packaged from Japan contained some underaged sex stories and even though this is obviously not virtual CGI, it’s just illustrations, the Government began the process of destroying his life for a couple stories in a couple of those gigantic anthologies of Manga they print in Japan.

If animated sexual acts is comparable to animated violence, studies have shown that children identify with animated characters just as strongly as live action ones. Furthermore, children are every bit as likely to imitate animated acts of violence as they are live action depictions of violence. Children don’t necessarily draw the line as clearly as we might thnink.

With that said, I think we do tread a slippery slope when we over legislate morality. In some cases we tend be stuck, having to choose between the lesser of two evils. I think the lesser of the evils is to let government stay out of it and focus on laws that protect real children. As for simulated child porn, perhaps we should all do what I did when I rented an Animae film that graphicall depicted a underage sexual exploits and rape. I told the owner of the video store that I did not appreciate not being warned that the film depicted such scenes and that if he could not better screen and label his collection, I would take my business elsewhere.

I think that there’s also an issue of the legal definition of child which, as far as I know is defined by the 18 year old “age of consent.”

When most of us think of “kiddie porn” I think that we have an image of something involving-prepubescent people who are, clearly, “little kids.” (that’s an inexact term, but the problem is that it really is a common case of “I know one when I see one.”

Remember the Brooke Shields ads for Calvin Klein jeans with the “nothing comes between me and my Calvin’s” punch line? Some people at the time objected to it as “kiddie porn” and yet unless you knew that Brooke was under 18 there was nothing in the ad to suggest that. I don’t think that most of us would view that as “kiddie porn.”

I think that it is a mistake to have placed the age limit for “kiddie porn” so high. The thing that we must face is that kids in their “teenage years” are interested in sex, so there are going to be some questionable situations. One of the characteristics of reaching puberty is that suddenly the other sex becomes interesting rather than icky. I can remember their being a “he man woman hater’s club” on the play ground in the 5th and 6th grades. The girl’s had their equivalent. Needless to say, that went away some time in “Junior High” (which was 7th and 8th grades in my town).

When the first Federal law about child porn was announced, and I don’t remember its exact title or the date, I remember hearing the commentator describing it as making it illegal to “take a suggestive picture of a person under 18.” My concern with that was, I think obvious, namely how do you define “suggestive?” That was particularly brought home to me that same evening when I was flipping channels and came across the “Junior Cheerleader” competitions. I think the age group was 7th, 8th, and 9th grades. The girls were doing routines that included “bumps and grinds.” Now was the network in violation for showing girls under 18 performing suggestive acts?

I’ve not heard of any cases of that aspect of the having actually been abused, but it would certainly appear to have been an opportunity for abuse.

I think that any laws regarding morality must be carefully considered to avoid vagaries of interpretation, and I think that we make a mistake when we forget what is happening do to the normal awakening of an interest in sex with puberty. I support very strong programs to warn kids of the danger, but I have a problem with criminalize the actions of the 15-year old girl describe above. She may have been unwise, and at the limits of “normal curiosity” but her action is “normal” nonetheless.

An important point about the current law, no one pointed it, is that people finding criminal pornography in their PC can not denounce it.
Just say one man find some photos in his PC, maybe downloaded looking for other stuff, now make it more than three (easy). Now he can not denounce the fact because he would have not any shield.
Not only the current law is stupid, it is also criminogen.
It make a criminal of an innocent and protect crimes and criminals because the same act to be aware of a crime imply to be a criminal so an innocent must prefer to stay silent than to denounce the crime.

We shouldn’t buy child porn.But restricting it goes against the first amendment and we have to stand behind it or the constitution is nothing more them toilet paper. we should try to make child porn illegal world wide and prosecute child rapist. child abuse needs to be stopped now.